A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (23 page)

A team of ten-year-olds from the Gingersnap class have little cotton bunnytails on their costumes’ bottoms and rigid papier-mâché ears, and they can do some serious twirling. A squad of eleven-year-olds from Towanda does an involved routine in tribute to Operation Desert Storm. To most of the acts there’s either a cutesy ultrafeminine aspect or a stern butch military one; there’s little in between. Starting with the twelve-year-olds—one team in black spandex that looks like cheesecake leotards—there is, I’m afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they’re disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state’s criminal statutes handy and prominent. Also disturbing is that in an empty seat next to me is a gun, a rifle, real-looking, with a white wood stock, which who knows whether it’s really real or part of an upcoming martial routine or what, that’s been sitting here ownerless ever since the competition started.

Oddly, it’s the cutesy feminine routines that result in the really serious casualties. A dad standing up near the stands’ top with a Toshiba viewfinder to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls forward onto somebody eating a Funnel Cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them, and there’s an extended halt to the action, during which I decamp—steering way clear of the sixteen-year-olds on the basketball court—and as I clear the last row yet another baton comes
wharp-wharp
ing cruelly right over my shoulder, caroming viciously off big R.’s inflated thigh.

08/15/1105h. A certain swanky East-Coast organ is unfortunately denied journalistic impressions of the Illinois Snakes Seminar, the Midwestern Birds of Prey Demonstration, the Husband-Calling Contest, and something the Media Guide calls “The Celebrity ‘Moo-Moo’ Classic”—all of these clearly must-sees—because they’re all also in venues right near the Food and Dessert Tent Grotto, which even the abstract thought of another proffered wedge of Chocolate Silk Triple-Layer Cake in the shape of Lincoln’s profile produces a pulsing ache in the bulge I’ve still got on the left side of my abdomen. So right now I’m five acres and six hundred food-booths away from midday’s must-see events, in the slow stream of people entering the Expo Bldg.

I’d planned on skipping the Expo Bldg., figuring it was full of like home-furniture-refinishing demos and futuristic mockups of Peoria’s skyline. I’d had no idea it was…
air-conditioned
. Nor that it comprises a whole additional different IL State Fair with its own separate pros and patrons. It’s not just that there are no carnies or ag-people in here. The place is jammed with people I’ve seen literally nowhere else on the Fairgrounds. It’s a world and gala unto itself, self-sufficient: the fourth Us of the Fair.

The Expo Bldg.’s a huge enclosed mallish thing, AC’d down to 80°, with a cement floor and a hardwood mezzanine overhead. Every interior inch here is given over to adversión and commerce of a very special and lurid sort. Just inside the big east entrance a man with a headset mike is slicing up a block of wood and then a tomato, standing on a box in a booth that says
SharpKut,
hawking these spinoffs of Ginsu knives, “AS SEEN ON TV.” Next door is a booth offering personalized pet-I.D. tags. Another’s got the infamous mail-order-advertised Clapper, which turns on appliances automatically at the sound of two hands clapping (but also at the sound of a cough, sneeze, or sniff, I discover—caveat emp.). There’s booth after booth, each with an audience whose credulity is heartrending. The noise in the Expo Bldg. is apocalyptic and complexly echoed, sound-carpeted by crying children and ceiling-fans’ roar. A large percentage of the booths show signs of hasty assembly and say AS SEEN ON TV in bright brave colors. The booths’ salesmen all stand raised to a slight height; all have headset microphones and speakers with built-in amps and rich neutral media voices.

It turns out these franchised Expo vendors, not unlike the Blomsness carnies (any comparison to whom makes the vendors show canine teeth, though), go from State Fair to State Fair all summer. One young man demonstrating QUICK ‘N’ BRITE—“A WHOLE NEW CONCEPT IN CLEANING”—was under the persistent impression that he was in Iowa.

There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of a carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around this booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color. There’s a predictably strong odor surrounding the Southwestern Leatherworx booth. Likewise at Distressed Leather Luggage (missing hyphen? misplaced mod?). I’m not even halfway down one side of the Expo’s main floor, list-wise. The mezzanine has still more booths. There’s a booth that offers clock-faces superimposed on varnished photorealist paintings of Christ, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a Computerized Posture Evaluation booth. A lot of the headsetted vendors are about my age or younger. Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background. It’s just cool enough in here for a sweat-soaked shirt to get clammy. One vendor recites a pitch for Ms. Suzanne Somers’s THIGHMASTER while a lady in a leotard lies on her side on the fiberboard counter and demonstrates the product. I’m in the Expo Bldg. almost two hours, and every time I look up the poor lady’s still at it with the THIGHMASTER. Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady—friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition—informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is back on her side all the way to closing at 2300. I remark that her thighs must be pretty well Mastered by now, and her leg sounds like a bannister when she raps her knuckle against it, and we have a good laugh together until her vendor finally makes her ask me to scram.

The Copper Kettle All-Butter Fudge booth does brisk air-conditioned business. There’s something called a Full Immersion Body Fat Analysis for $8.50. A certain CompuVac Inc. offers a $1.50 Computerized Personality Analysis. Its booth’s computer panel’s tall and full of blinking lights and reel-to-reel tapes, like an old bad sci-fi-film computer. My own Personality Analysis, a slip of paper that protrudes like a tongue from a red-lit slot, says “Your Boldness of Nature is Ofset With The Fear Of Taking Risk” (sic
²
). My suspicion that there’s a guy hunched behind the blinking panel feeding its slot recycled fortune-cookie slips is overwhelming but unverifiable.

Booth after booth. A Xanadu of chintzola. Obscure non-stick cook-ware. “EYE GLASSES CLEANED FREE.” A booth with anti-cellulite sponges. More DIPPIN DOTS futuristic ice cream. A woman with Velero straps on her shoes gets fountain-pen ink out of a linen tablecloth with a Chapsticky-looking spot remover whose banner says “AS SEEN ON AMAZING DISCOVERIES,’ “ a wee-hour infomercial I’m kind of a fan of. A plywood booth that for $9.95 will take a photo and superimpose your face on either an FBI Wanted poster or a
Penthouse
cover. An MIA—BRING THEM HOME! booth staffed by women playing Go Fish. An anti-abortion booth called LIFESAVERS that lures you over with free candy. Sand Art. Shredded-Ribbon Art. Therm-L-Seal Double Pane Windows. An indescribable booth for “LATEST ADVANCE ROTARY NOSE HAIR CLIPPERS” whose other sign reads (I kid you not)
“Do Not Pull Hair From Nose, May Cause Fatal Infection”
Two different booths for collectible sports cards, “Top Ranked Investment Of The Nineties.” And tucked way back on one curve of the mezzanine’s ellipse:
yes:
black velvet paintings, including several of Elvis in pensive poses.

And people are buying this stuff. The Expo’s unique products are targeted at a certain type of Midwestern person I’d all but forgotten. I’d somehow not noticed these persons’ absence from the paths and exhibits. This is going to sound not just East-Coastish but elitist and snotty. But facts are facts. The special community of shoppers in the Expo Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as Kmart People. Farther south they’d be a certain fringe-type of White Trash. Kmart People tend to be overweight, polyestered, grim-faced, toting glazed unhappy children. Toupees are the movingly obvious shiny square-cut kind, and the women’s makeup is garish and often asymmetrically applied, giving many of the female faces a kind of demented look. They are sharp-voiced and snap at their families. They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket checkouts. They are people who work at like Champaign’s Kraft and Decatur’s A. E. Staley and think pro wrestling is real. I’m sorry, but this is all true. I went to high school with Kmart People. I know them. They own firearms and do not hunt. They aspire to own mobile homes. They read the
Star
without even a pretense of contempt and have toilet paper with little off-color jokes printed on it. A few of these folks might check out the Tractor Pull or U.S.A.C. race, but most are in the Expo to stay. This is what they’ve come for. They couldn’t give one fat damn about ethanol exhibits or carnival rides whose seats are hard to squeeze into. Agriculture shmagriculture. And Gov. Edgar’s a closet pinko: they heard it on Rush. They plod up and down, looking put out and intensely puzzled, as if they’re sure what they’ve come for’s got to be here someplace. I wish Native C. were here; she’s highly quotable on the subject of Kmart People. One big girl with tattoos and a heavy-diapered infant wears a T-shirt that says “WARNING: I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS.”

Have you ever wondered where these particular types of unfunny T-shirts come from? the ones that say things like “HORNEY IN 2.5” or “Impeach President Clinton… AND HER HUSBAND TOO!!”? Mystery solved. They come from State Fair Expos. Right here on the main floor’s a monster-sized booth, more like an open bodega, with shirts and laminated buttons and license-plate borders, all of which, for this subphylum, Testify. This booth seems integral, somehow. The seamiest fold of the Midwestern underbelly. The Lascaux Caves of a certain rural mentality. “40 Isn’t Old… IF YOU’RE A TREE” and “The More Hair I Lose, The More Head I Get” and “Retired: No Worries, No Paycheck” and “I Fight Poverty… I WORK!!” As with
New Yorker
cartoons, there’s an elusive sameness about the shirts’ messages. A lot serve to I.D. the wearer as part of a certain group and then congratulate that group for its sexual dynamism—“Coon Hunters Do It All Night” and “Hairdressers Tease It Till It Stands Up” and “Save A Horse: Ride A Cowboy.” Some presume a weird kind of aggressive relation between the shirt’s wearer and its reader—“We’d Get Along Better… If You Were A BEER” and “Lead Me Not Into Temptation, I Know The Way MYSELF” and “What Part Of NO Don’t You Understand?” There’s something complex and compelling about the fact that these messages are not just uttered but
worn,
like they’re a badge or credential. The message compliments the wearer somehow, and the wearer in turn endorses the message by spreading it across his chest, which fact is then in further turn supposed to endorse the wearer as a person of plucky or risqué wit. It’s also meant to cast the wearer as an Individual, the sort of person who not only makes but wears a Personal Statement. What’s depressing is that the T-shirts’ statements are not only preprinted and mass-produced, but so dumbly unfunny that they serve to place the wearer squarely in that large and unfortunate group of people who think such messages not only Individual but funny. It all gets tremendously complex and depressing. The lady running the booth’s register is dressed like a ’68 Yippie but has a hard carny face and wants to know why I’m standing here memorizing T-shirts. All I can manage to tell her is that the “HORNEY” on these “2.5 BEERS”-shirts is misspelled; and now I really feel like an East-Coast snob, laying judgments and semiotic theories on these people who ask of life only a Republican in the White House and a black velvet Elvis on the wood-grain mantel of their mobile home. They’re not hurting anybody. A good third of the people I went to high school with now probably wear these T-shirts, and proudly.

And I’m forgetting to mention the Expo Bldg.’s other nexus of commerce—church booths. The populist evangelism of the rural Midwest. An economy of spirit. It’s not your cash they want. A Church of God booth offers a Computerized Bible Quiz. Its computer is CompuVacish in appearance. I go eighteen for twenty on the Quiz and am invited behind a chamois curtain for a “person-to-person faith exploration,” which thanks anyway. The conventional vendors get along fine with the Baptists and Jews for Jesus who operate booths right near them. They all laugh and banter back and forth. The SharpKut guy sends all the vegetables he’s microsliced over to the LIFESAVERS booth, where they put them out with the candy. The scariest spiritual booth is right up near the west exit, where something called Covenant Faith Triumphant Church has a big hanging banner that asks “WHAT IS THE
ONE
MAN MADE THING IN HEAVEN?” and I stop to ponder, which with charismatics is instant death, because a breastless bushy-browed woman is out around the booth’s counter like a shot and in my personal space. She says “Give up? Give up do you?” I tell her I’ll go ahead and bite. She’s looking at me very intensely, but there’s something off about her gaze: it’s like she’s looking
at
my eyes rather than
into
them. What one man-made thing, I ask. She puts her finger to her palm and makes screwing motions. Signifying coitus? (I don’t say “coitus” out loud, though.) “Not but one thing,” she says. “The holes in Christ’s palms,” screwing her finger in. It’s scary. Except isn’t it pretty well known that Roman crucifees were nailed at the wrists, since palm-flesh won’t support weight? So but now I’ve been drawn into an actual dialogue, going so far as to let the lady take my arm and pull me toward the booth’s counter. “Lookee here for a second now,” she says. She has both hands around my arm. I feel a sinking in my gut; I’m programmed from childhood to know that I’ve made a serious error. A Midwestern child of academics gets trained early on to avoid these weird-eyed eager rural Christians who accost your space, to say Not Interested at the front door and No Thanks to mimeoed leaflets, to look right through streetcorner missionaries as if they were NYC panhandlers. I have erred. The woman more or less throws me up against the Covenant Faith counter, on which counter is a fine oak box, yay big, with a propped sign: “Where Will YOU Be When YOU Look Like THIS?” “Take you a look-see in here.” The box has a hole in the top. Inside the box is a human skull. I’m pretty sure it’s plastic. The interior lighting’s tricky. But I’m pretty sure the skull isn’t genuine. I haven’t inhaled for over a minute now. The woman is looking at the side of my face. “Are you
sure
is the question,” she says. I manage to make my straightening-up motion lead right into a backing-away motion. “Are you a hundred percent
surer.
” Overhead, on the mezzanine, the THIGHMASTER lady’s still at it, on her side, head on her arm, smiling cross-eyed into space.